Hi,

we are into Help Desk - Technical Support
I am mainly involved into the WFM - Tool and currently getting trained on IEX.

Just wanted to know some stuff from you, would be great if you can help me out.

Looking out for calculating No. of FTE required for a month (I can do it for Hourly and Half Hourly)
but is there a way to calculate for a month
Ex: - 25000 calls / month, 10 mins AHT, 90% in 20 secs SLA, 30% shrinkage.
I have half hourly call distribution for 3 months.


Thanks in advance,

Regards,
rksanty
ITsolutions

60

Ok,

How (roughly) did you get there?

Show your working (as I'm sick of being told) :-)

DaveA

Can't, knowledge is power!

32. But made lots of assumptions on hours of operations.

To plagerise totally.....

"Power corrupts,
Absolute power....


Is even more fun..." :-)


All Hail....

DaveA

Arf!

Erlang calculates the staffing in each half hour in a typlical week based on aht, IT help line call profile (just taken a week to be the monthly calls divided by 4) and service level required. Added up and uplifted by the shrinkage percentage to give the total employed figure, then divided by 37.5.

PS Paul, using 32 FTE leaves about 14% for availability and shinkage unless your using 70 hours for an FTE?

Eamon

My entry is 44.

Assumtions:
Opening Hours 09:00 - 17:00 (8 hours)
21 Working Days per month
Agent works 7.5 hours per day.

From Erlang
Average calls per day = 1190
Service Level = 90% in 20sec
Average Handle Time = 10 minutes
Answer is 32 agents (but at 78% usage level)
Answer is 36 agents at 69% usage
Convert to FTEs = 38.5 (36 * 8 / 7.5)
Addition 1 in 7 for holidays/sickness = 5.5
Total FTEs = 44

My original witha 30% uplift for the shrinkage.

Hi All,

Thanks a lot for all your views on this,
Let me give some more inputs on this,

Total call volume - 25000
AHT - 10 mins
SL - 90% in 20 secs
Shrinkage - 30%
Occupancy - 90%
Total login hrs - 9
Breaks 1 hrs total
Actualy login over phone - 8hrs

I had calculated from my end got my requirement over 70 techs,
I am just curios whether this no. sounds ok

Need your experience on this,
would be great help

Thanks

Santosh

Based on monthly volumes of 25,000 calls per month, and assuming that a 90% in 20 service level would equate to a 2% abandonment rate for helpdesk callers, an AHT of 600 secs and an agent working day of 9 hours (1 hour in paid breaks) and an overall shrinkage level of 30% the number you need is 48 FTE.

(55 FTE if worked out as a 7.5 hour paid day as I looked at before, the difference from my earlier 60 is accounted for by the lower call count by working out the weekly volume as 25,000 x 12 / 52 and taking abandonment into account)

You'll notice that I haven't included occupancy in the calculation, that's because occupancy (the percentage of time an agent spends handling calls divided by the total time they are planned to be handling telephone calls) is dependant on the call pattern, volume, aht and service level, i.e. the number of agents required as dictated by the erlang calculation also determines what your occupancy will be, In this case about 67%. Applying a 90% occupancy calculation to this FTE figure would artificially deflate the requirement and make the service level impossible to hit

I hope this helps

Eamon

Hi All,

Our team is into Help desk (technical support) where the base line support is one and the same, it just differs from the region.
I was trying to develop a module where in i can share an agent taking calls for one client to another client, which i can call him as an shared agent.

Ex: - If a new client gives call volume, aht, service level and asks to give in the no. of staff required, and if we say the FTE required is 10.
the client would come back and say they would bill in for only 8 FTE's.

what i thought is even though i can have 10 FTE they would do the billing for 8 FTE, where in i can use 2 of them as shared resources from other client.

I wanted to know is there any procedure to follow, how do we calculate utilization of a shared resources.
we have some of the clients in the same way saying, they need our service for around only 30 calls per month, but 24 * 7 support.

This sounds very tricky, but if this works out then its really great.

Your experience on this is really appriciated.

Thanks
santhosh

hi guys i've been with our workforce for a while, i'm new with erlang and wondering if what function was used for the calculation.. thank you in advance!

OK,



Let's define some variables



AHT (IB) = I



AHT (OB) = X



Productivity Required (%) =P





Work Hours (Per Day)= W





Staff Available (FTE) = S





IB Calls = C (Avg per day)





IB:OB Ratio ( R :to 1)











Rearrange as required.



HTH



DaveA

i was able to understand the formula aside "C" and "R". what does it stands for?

im confused about effiency and occupancy. the data that i have is only efficiency. can they be inter mixed?

assuming i have this nos.

Total call volume - 5000/week
AHT - 5 mins
SL - 80% in 30 secs
Shrinkage - 20%
Efficiency - 85%
Hours of operation - 17 hours / day
Breaks 1 hrs total

thanks for your help. i appreciate it!

Err,

Not sure what you mean.

They're defined in the variables.

Efficiency / Occupancy / Productivity tend to be synonymous.

I take it you've been given an target.

How are you defining shrinkage?

Just as a query, how much background do you have in WFM?

The calc above is for modifying known IB callflows and modelling
OB calling within the IB peaks and troughs.

In relation to the Erlang-C Calculation the distribution (NOT FUNCTION)
is a modified POISSON.





or expanded



HTH

DaveA

Wow!

There I am, idlely surfing the net and I come across a thread that looks like one one of those old Open University programmes (one for the older readers)!

What joy!

Lester - you need 27 Agent FTE (Full-time equivalents) for the paramenters you've stated above. Use this as a benchmark, if you need to answer 10% more calls with the same AHT then employ 10% more agents.

Then get involved with erlang, the erlang add-in for excel (just type that into a serch engine) is a good place to start.

Dave - you need a jacket with elbow patches

Eamon

A 10% uplift in AHT would not return a 10% increase in net staffing when using erlang.

My answer would be 52.64 fte and 56.71 fte for a 10% uplift in AHT (Which equates to 7.73% increase) Both are net of shrinkages and are based on a 7 day operation 9 -5 and 9-12 weekends.

The question asked was

i'm new with erlang and wondering if what function was used for the calculation

That's what I answered.

As I've said before, add-in's and WFM products are
great BUT you should have at least some understanding of where
the data comes from and how it's calculated.

Blind faith in the output from ANY application not just WFM
is a bad thing.

You can't be an accountant or even an accounts clerk just by using
SAGE or MONEY etc, some basic knowledge is required.

Same rule applies here.

HTH

DaveA

"A 10% uplift in AHT would not return a 10% increase in net staffing when using erlang".

Absolutely correct, wasn't using erlang, hence my "Then get involved with erlang” comment. I was providing Lester with a starting point and a broad basis for planning before he got himself immersed with the whole erlang thing.

As for your suggestion, I have some observations -
52.64 FTE, Net of Shrinkage represents 65.8 employed FTE (52.64/(1-20%) based on a 37.5 hour week per employed FTE that equates to 2,467.5 employed hours (65.8 * 37.5)
The amount of work that needs to be done each week is 5,000 calls multiplied by 5 mins per call, expressed in hours (5000 * 5 / 60) = 416
Therefore the time, in your model that agents would spend handling calls as a proportion of their total employed hours would be 17% (416 / 2467.4) against my suggestion, which equates to 41% (416 / (27 * 37.5)). Even if we consider that you already have shrinkage included in your FTE figure and that an FTE works 35 hours per week then they are still only working 23% of their employed hours

Against industry norms of around 40% - 55% even my calculation looks inefficient, this is due to the final parameter of opening hours - 17 hours per day, not the opening hours you have suggested, also I have factored in that at least 2 people need to be present on the phones at any one time to ensure that the opening hours can be covered, irrespective of how low the volumes get.

So yes, increasing from 52.64 to 56.71 is a 7.3% increase in staffing, however going from 27 to 52.64 is a 95% increase to begin with.

Eamon